


Lethe and Mnemosyne on the Banks of the Acheron

by anonymous_sibyl



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-09-04
Updated: 2006-09-04
Packaged: 2017-10-04 03:50:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,192
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25624
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anonymous_sibyl/pseuds/anonymous_sibyl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the way that the universe provides for lost souls such as they, they were there for each other, but they didn't know it yet.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lethe and Mnemosyne on the Banks of the Acheron

**Author's Note:**

> This work is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/). None of the media or characters written about in my fanfiction belong to me and I make no profit from these works. 

"Do I know you?"

"No."

"Maybe that was the wrong question. Do you know me?" He ran a hand through his shaggy hair, and shook his head in confusion. "I can't remember, well, anything."

That's why he was there, to forget. She, oddly enough, was there to remember. Everything has purpose. In the way that the universe provides for lost souls such as they, they were there for each other, but they didn't know it yet.

"Faith," she said, and hesitated before extending her hand. She wasn't sure if she should touch him, or if he were even real. Things had been confusing for her, for a long time, and this dark cool place wasn't any less puzzling. He took her hand and held it firmly between both of his before releasing it. She remembered his hands, and remembered how they felt on the body that both was and wasn't hers. "Your name is Riley. Riley Finn. You're a soldier. At least I think you are."

"And what are you?"

"I'm… I don't know."

"You can't remember?"

"No, I…" This was not her intention, to confess her sins to the immaculate Finn, but she and he were the only people there, in that place, and she didn't know how to get home. "I'm not like you."

"Then who are you like?"

"Her."

"Her," he repeated, his voice an echo that frightened her somehow. "Who is she?"

"Nobody." She held her hands toward him as if to ward him off. "Everything."

"You don't want to talk about her."

"Neither do you."

"I don't know her."

That was true, though not in the way he meant it. Had the woman in question been available for the asking, she would have said that neither of them knew her and that both of them should. Maybe she would have walked away from them. Maybe they would have walked away from her.

"Where are we?" she asked, turning around and examining the small room.

"You're asking the man who doesn't know his own name?"

His smile was reflected in her laugh, just as her careful movements were mirrored by his own. In the darkness they appeared as two halves of the same coin, yin and yang, comedy and tragedy. Love and hate. Life and death.

"Faith?"

Something in his voice stopped her so she turned to face him.

"Do we need to know where we are?"

"We do if we want to get out of here."

"Do we want to do that?" He easily blocked the light blow she aimed at his arm. "I just mean, maybe there's a reason we're here."

"Yeah. A bad reason."

"Or a good one."

"Are you high?"

Riley tapped one finger on his temple. "Don't know, remember?"

She hissed in disgust. "Well, trust me, you're not high. You would never be high. You're too, too… uptight."

"I sound boring."

"You are."

He slumped against the wall and closed his eyes. In the distance, water rushed over rocks and the wind whipped through dying trees. One door closed and another opened.

"It seems to me," he said, opening his eyes and crossing his arms determinedly over his chest, "that since I don't remember being boring that I am under no obligation at all to continue being boring."

"Oh, like it's that easy." Faith rolled her eyes at his earnestness. "Like you can just decide to be not boring. If it worked that way I could have come out of a coma a whole new person."

"How do you know you didn't?" He extended one arm and poked her lightly in the ribs. "For that matter, how do you know you're not still in a coma? Maybe I'm all a dream."

"I met you after the coma!" Again, she warded him off with a rough gesture of her hands. "I don't want to talk about it."

"It, her, there's a great deal you don't want to talk about." He closed one eye in a slow wink that made him seem far more handsome—and far more dangerous—than she remembered. "Me, now I'll talk about anything."

"That's only because you don't remember anything," she muttered.

"And you remember everything."

"I do."

She was wrong, of course, just as he was. She remembered facts but not lessons, and he remembered lessons not facts. Like a broken coin they fit together, they just didn't know how yet.

He took her hand and pulled her to the floor to sit with him. That close to the ground they could smell the water, yet neither questioned its presence in that small square room. Faith made lists of the facts of her existence and Riley gently nudged her toward the lessons. Never once did she mention Buffy. Even had he known of her omission, he wouldn't have mentioned it.

"It's a calling," he said. "Something you do for you, because you just can't do anything else. I wish I had one."

"How do you know you don't?"

"Do I?"

She thought about how she'd known him, as Buffy's boyfriend, as the military man with farm boy's eyes and a lover's hands, and she thought about her place in the shadows of that group, and imagined what his must have been. "No. I don't think you do."

"Maybe I should." He nudged her in the ribs with his elbow. "Maybe I could, if we get out of here. If I turn out to be real and not just a figment of your imagination, that is."

"You're real."

"Am I?"

"Yes." She nudged him back and told him one last story, explained why she knew his name, and how she would recognized the scars on his body even in the darkness.

"I loved you?" he asked, his hand resting heavily on her own.

"Not me. Her."

"But you," he insisted. "I touched you. I loved you."

"You thought I was her."

He was silent as he absorbed this fact, eyes closed again, the sound of water and wind heavy in both their ears. Doors banged wildly, as if in a summer storm, but there, in that room, they sat in peace.

"Did you love me?" he finally asked. "In that night, did you love me?"

"I don't know."

Lies are told every day, not only by liars, but by lovers. They both knew the answer to that question, though neither of them was able to articulate it. She had loved him, not in that night, but in the memories of it, and he had loved her, in dreams of something he couldn't quite remember touching but wanted to shelter nonetheless.

"Did you want to?" he asked.

"Yeah. I think I did."

In the cold and the dark she leaned close to him and sighed. He put an arm around her shoulder and stroked the hair trapped under his fingers.

"It'll be okay, Faith," he said, before dropping a gentle kiss on her forehead.

"Yeah," she said, turning her face to his. "I guess it can be.

Her breath flowed over his lips, their mouths touched, and in that moment Riley Finn forgot to mourn and Faith Lehane remembered to live.


End file.
